Running With Demons
by antulien
Summary: Somewhere in the middle of the Afghanistan desert, a combat medic struggling with her sanity dies at the hands of a grieving civilian. Waking up on the shores of Middle Earth, she sets out on a quest to find answers - answers that a mad king far away might be able to give her. Thranduil/OC. Completely revamped and reposted.
1. Chapter 1

_**REPOST.**_

author's note: i'd just like to warn you, i know very little about military history or anything like that. i did as much research as i could, but what i found was confusing in the very least, unhelpful at most. so, if you are more aware of what goes on in evac hospitals and it is just eating you up inside, please do let me know! i feel so stupid xD.

also, i had originally intended this to be one of those _lost __girl__ follows thorin on his quest_ stories - however, i suddenly changed my mind and decided her story should go somewhere else. and sadly i did post it before i came to this conclusion as to why it just wasn't 'feeling right'. now, i get it. it just makes more sense in cohesion with thranduil's story. they're both veterans of war. they're both hurting. they're both guarded. it just feels..._right. _it will still take place during the events of the hobbit, but it will have very little to do with thorin. this is all about thranduil. _bow chicka wow wow. _aw yeah, so classy.

anyway. enough rambling.

disclaimer - i own nothing that lives in middle earth. everything belongs to tolkien except my oc.

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><p>.<p>

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I've been staring at this crumpled piece of blank paper in my lap all afternoon.

It used to be so easy, you know. The words used to be fluid, effortless, flowing out of the tip of my pen without much thought or arrangement behind their purpose. They weren't necessarily colorful descriptions. Most of what I wrote in these letters were crude, basic outlines of my adventures. But it never bothered me before. I was just…telling a story. And the only person in the world important enough to know my story wouldn't care if it was scribbled out in kindergarten runes on the back of a travel brochure. She just wanted to know I was alive, carrying on with the adventures she read about each week with all the spirit and optimism of the girl she knew and loved. After all, I didn't want her to worry.

That was _before. _

Before what….I can't be certain of what to call it myself. All I have are symptoms of a greater problem. My enemy is nameless, without form, a difficult foe to face as it has none to speak of. The only concrete evidence I have of his existence at all are the shadows of insecurity and anxiety that he leaves in his wake. I second guess my every move when he is nearby. To eat, sleep, even breathe - I'm always wondering, terrorized by the very idea, if he is watching, if he will slip into the innermost corners of my conscious thoughts and steal into their threadbare frame. He becomes them, turning their surety into crumbling shrines of doubt that turn every act of bravery and every good deed to dust in my hands. I don't know what to call him – only that he's created this terrible wall between me and everything that I thought I used to be.

There's no use. I rumple the paper in my hands, furiously crushing it into my sticky skin of my palms until a half-formed ball forms, then I chuck it across the room. It lies jagged and dirt-stained on the bare reddish clay of the tent floor. A searing breeze shuffles inside, ruffling every shred of cloth within. I watch the paper bend under its prying fingers. All the while, my head stays perfectly blank, untouched like pure white marble.

Maybe there's no story left to tell – at least none that she would want to hear. All that's left is the end, where time marches in and steals her little girl away to face the fate she had always somehow been designed for. I don't think I could bear telling her that her little girl is nothing more than a whining, cowardly wretch who doesn't deserve to be a Marine.

It's all just as well. With my shift coming up, I have work to do that requires all my attention, and I won't have time or even the energy to worry about it. The hot restless air sucks itself back outside and I follow it, ducking beneath the burlap tent flap and walking out into pure, unfiltered sunlight.

For a moment, I just stand there, still just as overwhelmed by the unrepentant power of the Middle Eastern desert as the day I stepped foot on its enemy shores. I shield my eyes and look up into the long stretch of open sky above us, thin strips of cloud smothered behind a veil of heat that shimmers against the blanched peeling blue. And there in the distance - the sun, a tireless beating tyrant who lords over the rest of us mere mortals.

As ever, there's an electric trace of challenge sharpening the air. It circles the hems of my dungarees, prickling at my ankles, and I can feel it – the cruel laugh of the desert brushing up against us, satin-soft as ribbon against our painfully aware skin. Like a dark promise - _if they don't kill you, I will._

Dipping my hands into my pockets, I move on, accepting the knowledge of uncertain death with more ease than I used to. Our first few weeks here, everyone was on edge, their trigger finger always remembering the cool weight of the gun barrel under them, how good it felt to be armed. We hardly slept and ate less. Mostly we looked like we were always on drugs. Wide-eyed, restless, jumpy in that sad but funny way that boots always are. As we hardened, and the outer protective shell of experience began to form between us and the rest of the world like a film of glass, we calmed down and transitioned easily into the unpredictable patterns of guerrilla warfare. In between skirmishes, we learned to compartmentalize the fears and deep-set anxiety which plagued us, translate them so that they became useful instead of distracting. Fear became vigilance, and it grew impossible to wake a sleeping soldier for fear of having your neck wrung like a wet rag. We settled into this new life of ours with a sort of resignation that back then, we still didn't quite understand, accepting the good with the bad without question.

Now we knew better - no matter how hard we tried to reclaim that old innocence , there was no going back.

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That night, they bombed a nearby town, where we were later told a small platoon from the three-five had followed and infiltrated a small, but well-known infidel base.

As the casualties poured in from echelon two, I was bumped up from 'administrative' work to serve a twelve hour shift in the trauma ward. Being pulled from my medical duties just a few weeks prior, I was only permitted to stabilize patients, and among those I was only allowed to treat minor to moderate injuries. It didn't make much of a difference. Plucking shrapnel from the shredded body of a small child with 'moderate' proved no less unnerving than treating incidents of thoracic degloving or third degree burns.

The following hours were a lesson in futility. I held a lot of dying hands, inflated collapsed lungs that would fail mere minutes later, administered morphine and breathing tubes, and witnessed enough last words to fill a book. Most of it I didn't understand. They muttered to unseen gods, eyes glazed over as they searched cracked ceilings for answers to prayers. Sometimes they realized I was there, looked right through me, and whispered the only words they knew in my language – _help me, please God, please help me. _

When the bedlam finally died down - tarps thrown over the dead in the morgue and the living not much further from the same fate – an XO armed with orders from higher up handed me a clipboard and sent me in the general direction of the supply tent, mumbling something about making myself useful. Exhausted, but relieved for something to do other than evacuate corpses from triage, I escaped to one of the smaller rear tents. It was quieter here – easier to concentrate on nothing, and far away from the thrum of dying murmurs and anguished moaning.

There were three of us – supply sergeant, specialist, and me. The sergeant clapped me on the back as I came in, nodding his thanks with a strained, too-thin smile for standing in for his second specialist.

I responded as best I could under the circumstances, which – after seeing the look on the sergeant's face – was no response at all. His huge, callused fingers closed over the sharp upper peaks of my shoulder blades to stop me from coming in.

"Just came from ICU?"

I nodded weakly, feeling the first traces of exhaustion start to seep through me. "Yes, sergeant."

"How long you been on shift, corpsman?"

"Can't say I know for sure." I scratch the back of my head, eyes locked on the dirt floor. "They pulled me out of patient administration. Short-staffed. Anyone who knew the right end of a needle got pulled in to help."

He looked at me like I was growing horns from my temples. "…That was yesterday morning."

"I'm fine."

He saw a lost cause in front of him. It took him a while, but he finally realized there was not much more he could do to persuade me otherwise. Resignation flooding his tired features, he nodded and shuffled to the side to let me through. "All right, carry on. Specialist Harmon is in the back with rations."

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Time passes differently in this place. Faster, with desperation and need fueling the quickness of it all. The moment you step outside into the cooling air, settling at your feet in mounds of trampled tired dust – it hits you. How long you've dragged your heavy feet. And how much you really need sleep, despite the tightness roiling in your gut.

I trudge through the rows of empty cots – glad for the solitude after two days in the company of the sick and dying – and feel the silence filter through the balmy air. At the end of the first row, my own cot, the epicenter of my entire world, lies untouched. It looks as though I'd never left it, but I've returned changed, much as I always do. It stays the same, static in a world ravaged by turmoil and painted in varying shades of blood (wet and dry and blackened and new), and yet I always feel like a stranger when I come back here.

Exhaustion hits me hard as I slump down into the rusty springs. All the breath sputters out of my mouth, the smoke of an old extinguished flame gurgling in my throat, and my lips hang slack as I lie back and struggle to breathe. I close my eyes and try to remember how lungs work. Bring air in, push air out, and all the while working in the background while the body moves on and the head thinks and the heart struggles to learn. I open my eyes, shaking my head at the thought of waxing poetic over something as simple as breathing. I'm no Walt Whitman. And I don't want to be either.

My eyes are heavy, but the last thing I want to do is sleep. The very thought of letting my head roll back, vision darkening all the while as I slip away, no control over the images that surface as the sleep deepens – anxiety starts to bubble, hot and tightly coiling around the outer edges of my heart. I need a distraction.

There's a book in my knapsack, the Pelican Brief – one of the old favorites from an even older life. I was allowed to bring a couple of them, though I lost my favorite copy of Sherlock Holmes somewhere outside Suwayrah and cried over it for days in secret – or so I'd thought. It had been the one my mother gave me for my sixteenth birthday, an early edition with earmarked corners and old, withered pages that smelled like a dusty library. I never did hear the end of it from the other guys. They called me Cry-Baby for weeks. Even afterwards, when the situation blew over, they still laughed and looked over their shoulders at me whenever books or even Sherlock Holmes were brought up in casual conversation.

I had few worldly possessions here. Books, my mother's letters, pen, a few reams of paper, and a picture –

The thought occurred to me with a thrill. I patted the breast pocket of my dungarees with a hint of panic, sitting up in the bed as the fatigue cleared for a moment and adrenaline flooded in. With a sigh of relief, I quickly calm down, pulling the wrinkled picture out with trembling hands. It looked older than it really was. A year's worth of folding, unfolding, and folding again had taken its toll on the smooth glossy finish, although it still felt soft and familiar in these hands that had long since crusted over with callus. Sometimes I hated looking at it, especially in front of the others. They always stared at me with pity, the way anyone does when someone shows signs of homesickness. It weighs in all of us like an anchor, pulling us down, making us remember. Sometimes it's not good to remember, but to forget and carry on.

But now, with no one else around and my chest tight and prickling with homesickness, the desire to look at the picture slowly burns away into a slow, searing ache. Tears gather at the rims of my eyes, scalding the tired fragile skin around them. I open the picture and smooth down the wrinkles with a touch of worship stealing into the tips of my fingers. I bring a still-shaking hand to my face to wipe furiously at the tears that sit warm and glinting on the whittled crests of my cheekbones.

I look so – _young. _My eyes are folded away behind plump crinkles of skin – still bright, still shining, like little lights in a dark distance. They look up into the lens of the camera with rivulets of laughter running through them, and I can almost hear the sound of my mother's rumbling laugh rising up to meet it in the background. A baggy Nirvana shirt sags over my bony shoulders, still just a girl trying to fill up the open space of a quickly growing body. I remember that summer – I'd shot up three inches, spent long nights rubbing my throbbing legs under the blankets, and my mother cut off all my jeans because she couldn't afford to buy me new ones. I'd been wearing a pair of the shorts in the photo, their frayed ends spilling over my sun-browned thighs.

And then there was Iggy right next to me, all curled up into my crouched figure as I hugged him to my chest. He was one of the best friends I had in the world, besides my mother. And a dog.

A golden retriever, to be more exact, but it didn't bother me that my best friend walked on four legs instead of two, barked instead of gossiped, and drooled all over my favorite pillow. I could tell him anything and he would keep all my secrets. He watched Die Hard with me at Christmas the whole way through, even twice if I insisted, and curled up next to me when I was sick – never leaving my side. That summer the picture was taken, we'd taken him with us to the river for the first time, and I remember laughing when he'd taken one look at the water and jumped in without a second thought. He'd sloshed back to shore, barking and throwing back his head as if to invite me in, then raced back in when it became apparent that I wouldn't follow. He got even later though –barreling through our half-made camp without warning, dripping wet, and he'd stolen the hot dogs mom had laid out on the picnic table to make for later. He left a devastation of mud and waterlogged blankets in his wake, watching us from the sidelines as we grumbled and cleared away the rubble.

I seem to come back into my own body, the transition jarring, and it left me sobbing. My vision went hazy as I stared at it, my hand over my mouth, the other holding onto that picture in a vise grip. I had the most horrible sinking feeling that the girl in the picture – the happy girl, the unscathed girl with dreams and hopes and plans - was gone forever. Even worse, I missed my dog.

"Are you okay?"

I startle at the sound of another human voice. It blared across the stretch of empty cots between us, though I think maybe they'd intended to be loud, to be heard over my crying. Bile tickles the insides of my throat as it passes through; I swallow hard against it and keep my face hidden away in the shadows.

"Hey, corpsman…" The voice came again. A man's voice, young, probably not much older than me. "Are you okay? You sick or somethin'?"

"I'm fine!" I snap back at him, folding the picture up again and shoving it back into my pocket. "Everything's fine…"

Those last words, I think, were directed more toward myself than him.

"Yeah, well…" He sounded unsure. "Just, holler if you need me I guess."

I nod, too humiliated to turn around and face him. He sinks down into his cot much the same way as I did – an audible sigh of relief, the realization of weariness dawning on him, and then the silence, when we all start to reflect and forget where we are. Just for a little while.

"Man, what a day." He groans, punching the lumps in his pillow. Like it would help.

I don't say anything in reply. He could just as well be talking to himself.

"Sad, you know? That they get caught in the crossfire just cause everyone's got to do their fighting in the middle of civilization…"

In all honesty, one of the last things I wanted to do right now was ponder the double-edged sword that was humanity. I didn't question _why _the battles took place in the middle of towns and cities full of innocent people…I just helped clean up the mess afterward. If you started to question, if you let doubt settle in where obedience should be, it would only get harder to do what you had to do. If we were all honest with ourselves, the most important question, the one we should all we be asking was why war even existed in the modern age in the first place.

We shouldn't be here. We should all be living in peace with one another. And yet, after thousands of years of trial and error, of growing into the thinking, feeling version of humanity that we've become, we've seemed to pour all this knowledge and capability into learning newer, more systematic ways of killing each other.

"It's better not to think about it. You won't like the answers you find."

"You sound like my grandma…" he snorts. "God, I miss them. How long you been here?"

"Sixteen months."

"Long time."

"Yeah, tell me about it."

He goes quiet for a second, then sits upright in his bed. "Did you hear that?"

I turn around, adrenaline building again. "What - ?"

He sits up, legs uncurling beneath him so his feet touch the floor, perched like a coil ready to spring on the edge of his mattress. His eyes are locked on the tent flap – or something beyond it.

His voice, when it reaches me, is almost no louder than a whisper. "I heard something."

Suddenly, he bolts upright and looks over his shoulder at me. Fear digs deep into the dark back corners of his eyes, taking root in the shadows hiding there. Without a word, he waves me over, and I mop my face quickly before tip-toeing to his side. My dungarees, stiff with sweat and old blood, barely move despite my quick, jarring gait. The fabric grates loudly in protest against the stillness.

We both know better than to speak when on high alert. Instead, he motions for me to follow his eyes, where we both find a shadow roving in the moonlight against the backdrop of the burlap tent. The corpsman reaches for his knapsack as quietly as he can manage, both of us keeping close watch on the shadow. It seems uncertain, as if lost, and it seems to slowly dawn on the both of us that whoever they are, they don't belong here.

Digging through the sack, he seemed to locate what he's looking for with ease and drew a gleaming silver pistol out from the bottom of it as he dropped the sack unceremoniously to the ground at his feet. He gestured for me to follow him, and suddenly I wished I'd had time to get my own weapon from my knapsack. It's too late now.

We both slip out from underneath the tent flap, making minimal noise except for the crunch of rock and sand beneath our heavy boots. The shadow slips out of sight, making a right turn at the back end of the tent in front of us. We follow behind, making a hard right where he'd turned just a moment before. It was a man dressed in long, black robes that looked threadbare in places and stiff with blood in others. He was barefoot with open gashes catching the moonlight on his ankles. The combat medic in me starts to itch at the sight, wanting to clean and bandage the wounds before they turn gangrenous. They look deep – maybe he'd been involved in the skirmish that took place in the town nearby two days ago, a patient wandering around after waking up and finding himself in strange surroundings. The corpsman at my side thought the same. Unlike me, he seemed to know rudimentary Arabic, and called out to the man in the strange, musical language.

The man turned around. One eye glared white and wide open in the darkness while the other, seemingly missing, retreated into the back of his head, cast in deep, bloody shadows. The sight would have sickened me if I weren't so accustomed to gore.

He replied in his own language, outstretching his hand in a way that seemed accusatory. Anger etched deep lines into his face, the angles cruel under harsh white light. Fear washed over me. This man seemed much more than angry – he was enraged.

The corpsman next to me seemed to think the same. He raised his gun and, even in the foreign tongue that he spoke, I could tell from the heightening tone of his voice that he was warning the man.

But the man did not listen. Instead, he curled his fingers into his palm, pointing only his index finger first at me and then at the corpsman.

"You," he said, pointing. "And…you…"

He continued to speak in Arabic, but the sound of it changed. He seemed to be…chanting. His good eye began to shiver, his arms shaking too as he hummed those otherworldly incantations, and then rolled completely into the back of his head. The corpsman screamed at him to drop his weapon in English, forgetting, in his panic, to translate the warning into Arabic. Ignoring him, the man droned on, and I felt cold as I shuffled backwards in the sand.

Finally, the stranger put his arms down and reached into the pocket of his robes. The corpsman stopped screaming and flung himself backwards as he pulled something out from underneath the loose, black shawls.

He pointed it at me and I, rooted to the ground in shock, realized with a stab of fear that it was a handgun. He cocked it, finger closing slowly, purposefully over the trigger. I wasn't moving, stupid girl that I was, and my stupidity afforded him the ability to relish the act of carrying out his vengeance.

"What the hell is wrong with you?!" The corpsman shrieked at me from the ground. "Run, you stupid bitch, run!"

There was no use. I'd lost all feeling in my legs, the ability to move at all, much less run. It was as if something held me there. Fate, maybe, or just the mortal fear of knowing what would soon come.

I closed my eyes as the trigger pulled and the deafening crack of a gunshot ricocheted harshly off the material of the tents around us. The bullet hit, finding its mark with ease, and the force of metal shredding through paper-thin flesh slammed my body back into the ground.

I didn't feel a thing. I was dead on impact.

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><p>let me know what you thought, if you'd like! thank you for sticking with me to the end. :)<p> 


	2. Chapter 2

author's notes - i own nothing but my own OC. everything else belongs to tolkien.

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><p>Strange whispers outline the backdrop of the void. They gurgle through the undertow, shifting here and there between consciousness and memory in a voice like restless water. It must be water. I can feel it, quick with a barely there touch that tests the surface of my skin with curious fingers, only to disappear again as it draws away. Almost like waves. Back and forth. It's the first bloodless dream I've had in years.<p>

No – not a dream. If it was, I'd be caught in the middle of a nightmare, grisly puzzle-piece images of the war and rot and death I see just the same with my own waking eyes. Here, in this huge, dark oblivion that swallows me whole, I'm floating in the mouth of a giant. My ears are full of its thick inky tongue and I bounce against the mountain ranges of its solid teeth. Despite the violent push and pull of it all, I'm almost lulled into a sense of stillness. Almost.

I open my eyes and realize this isn't a mouth at all – I'm on a beach, water lapping at the soles of my sand-crusted boots, seeping into the ankles of my socks and soaking my pruny feet. There's not an inch of scratchy, dry desert in sight. No tents. No morphine. No war.

Digging the heels of my palms into the pliant sand, I push myself into a sitting position, gaping at my surroundings in disbelief. I'm dead – I'm supposed to be dead. I remember the man draped in blood and black, his waving arms and indistinguishable tongue, then the bullet he put right between my eyes. It's still fresh in my memory like it only just happened, my ears still throbbing with the explosive whip-crack of the pistol going off even as the corpsman at my feet fumbled for his own weapon. I'd watched the whole thing happen outside of myself, a soul ripped from the roots of its own body before it was even its time to go. Even if I could have stopped him, thrown myself to the ground and reached for the corpsman's gun to put the madman out of his misery – I didn't want to. I let it happen. No - I _wanted_ it to happen.

Water still swirled in the caverns my handprints carved from the mushy earth. The surf made a hollow, aching sound, an echo of what I used to hear when I pressed conch shells to my ear as a little girl. Above, the sky seemed to shiver and move with the cadence of the water reflecting beneath it, the same gentle blush of blue.

Then it occurred to me - this must be Heaven.

A feeling of peace picks at the collection of knots in my stomach. I lift my face and feel the heavy, brine-soaked breeze waft in from a horizon crushed between frames of jagged, emerald cliffs. I should feel sad, guilty, afraid. I should miss the weight of my fists knotting in the gritty underbrush of Iggy's fur. I should miss my mother and the way her eyes crinkled like mine when she smiled. They're still there. Shards of an old life still drawing blood somewhere in this old body I long to leave behind. I know those learned sensations, those familiar longings, and their brands still burn in the back of my head, but now they're cool, like handprints left behind in fractured concrete– they're drowned out now by promise of peace and quiet curling up inside my ears.

This is it – I'm finally free.

I ease myself back into a bed of sun-warmed sand. Another wave booms at my feet, barrages of salty foam. They land all around me, noiseless, and bring no ghosts of blood or fear to mind. Sunlight flattens its warm palms against my face as I start to drift away, the gesture comforting, and I'm reminded of the hands of my own mother. No more war. No more battle on the inside.

Somewhere, far away, I almost imagine I can hear footsteps plodding through the wet sand…

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This time, when I woke, I knew I heard voices.

The low hum of the surf at my feet is gone. There's no sunlight, no open sky above me with its careless brushstroke of clouds clustering in the east. I throw my head to the side and feel the muscles in my cheeks tighten, still trying to chase after some lost dream. My hands graze its gauzy tail but fumble and fall away when it leaves me in its dusty wake. I open my eyes and feel drained, as though I hadn't slept at all.

At once, I sit up, my eyes widening despite their heaviness. Fabric grazes my knuckles as I tuck them into fists and I look down, panic warring with confusion, when I find myself in a bed – pure white sheets of the softest material I've ever felt in my life tangled around my legs and bare feet. Behind the pillow crushed beneath my knuckles, a headboard carved entirely from pale, glimmering wood arches between two equally intricate bedposts. I stare at the fine, delicate edges whittled into the smooth surface of the wood, tracing them over and over before an image starts to form in my head. It's a stylized portrait of a lonely man at sea, guiding his ship toward what seems a lush, but mountainous island far away.

The rest of my surroundings are no less otherworldly. Curtains of sheer, pearly gossamer twist in the breeze that floats in and out of a tall arched window with no glass. The room itself is domed and its corners rounded, bathed in warm, dappled light, with simple, straight-backed armchairs crowding the opposite wall. To my left, just a few footsteps away from the edge of the bed, an empty hearth stands guard at the edge of a gray stone shelf.

I throw the covers from my legs and find myself clothed in a loose, white nightgown. Though the room itself gave off an air of comfort and security, I couldn't swallow the panic that had begun to swell through my chest, making it hard to breathe. This isn't my cot, my burlap tent, my evac hospital – this isn't even Afghanistan.

I'm not even supposed to be alive.

A million questions zipline through my head, one after the other in quick succession as I untangle myself from grasping sheets and make a beeline for the door. Some didn't even make it into sentences, but all of them bellow through the emptiness in my head and make it ache from the bursting clamor, like a thousand voices shouting in my ears. _Where – what the – how the hell – where the hell am I?!_

Finally, the last words came tumbling out of my mouth before I could realize my tongue was even working. They echoed through rich, golden halls that brought to mind impressionist paintings of summer and churches with stained glass windows – all vibrant color and sun-washed brilliance. No one answered, I knew they wouldn't, because this must be another one of my nightmares where I run and run and keep on running until I look down and don't have legs anymore – just bloody, tattered stumps.

Pillars etched from marble stood against bare sky, their smooth, reflective surface blinding as I stumbled out from beneath the eaves of one shaded corridor and into the next. I could hear the sea again, thundering against the face of the cliffs somewhere below me, but my eyes are seared through with piercing light and I can't see anything but blinking white stars. I couldn't even breathe. The air itself seemed to flash and pop like gunfire. Shaking violently, I grope for something – anything – to steady my failing legs. One blind, greasy palm finds a pillar nearby and grapples for purchase just as I lose my balance. I lurch forward to lean against the cool, polished surface and catch my breath as the entire world seems to keep spinning out of control.

A hand reaches through the hurricane and stills me. The spinning stops at once.

I whirl around, screaming, and back against the pillar as far as it would let me. I hug my arms around its solid form and wish I could melt into its epicenter - feeling, seeing, hearing nothing and becoming just like stone.

The creature before me is nothing short of angelic. I couldn't think of another word fitting enough to describe it. It isn't just tall, but towering, and its beauty fierce and angular despite the softness of the delicate features that looked as though they'd been shaped by the hands of Botticelli himself. The agile body is clothed in long, silver-blue robes that barely skirt the ground, and beneath the spotless hems the tips of long toes peeked out, as white as new snow. Those eyes – they blinked softly, slowly, at me, its curiosity running as deep as my own horror. _This can't be real – this isn't – this can't be – it isn't..._

And then it spoke in a voice just above a whisper, and the language in which it spoke was more beautiful than any song I'd ever heard. Its tongue glided over every syllable, every word I wished I could understand, and as it looked at me – perhaps expecting an answer or even just a sign that I understood – a deep and terrible yearning for it to speak again seemed to burgeon in my chest. It expanded until it pushed and crowded against my lungs. It took great effort just to breathe.

As panicked and fearful of this _thing _as I was, I wanted nothing more but to hear it speak those beautiful words again.

It took my hand, so small in the pale, elegant cage of those alien fingers, and a sudden calmness bled through my tingling fingertips. The urge to run lessened until it was no longer an overwhelming need, but a half-hearted wish, and in its passing I regained some of my former ability to speak.

"I don't know who you are...and you must be wondering who I am." I gestured to myself, pointing to my chest with the hand that I had ripped out of its mild grip. A low, sneaking murmur of that former urgency to run screaming from the room returned. "I need to know...where I am. Can you tell me where I am? This isn't...this - _do you speak any English_?"

It – and from the roundness of its still sharp, but feminine features I guessed it was a woman of some kind – began to talk again, lulling me back into a sort of trance as its song-like language cradled my sore, spinning head. It reminded me of a mother's lullaby or one of Mozart's symphonies – but infinitely more complex and beautiful.

Shaking myself out of the reverie, I grabbed the creature's hand with renewed urgency, tears prickling at the corners of my eyes. "Please...please you have to help me. I'm scared. I'm lost. The last thing I remember is a gun going off and I thought I was dead – please don't you know any English?!"

She was trying to console me, attempting to explain things in the only way she knew how. I could sense it from the tone of her voice, but the words were cold and lifeless as they were lost in translation. The panic balloon was swelling again; I could feel it inching its way up my throat, blocking the air from my screaming, pleading lungs. Her angelic face swam before my eyes.

Her arms wove around me, steadying me, and her voice rose high and clear like a bell over the deep, throaty roar of the sea below us. I felt safe sheltered against her silk-trimmed collarbone, my head balanced against her cool, earthy skin. All the panic and confusion that had been there, warring like angry titans with me caught in the middle – it all just seemed to dissipate at once. I was just so tired, so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open...like I hadn't slept in a hundred years.

By the time help came, I was already drifting away, far away, out to sea where green distant shores called to me.

.

.

.

"_Echuio. pen tithen_..."

When my eyes opened, I found myself already facing the direction of the voice. It was low and deep, like the rumble of the sea itself, but there was a warmth in its timber that betrayed its true form.

Like the one before, this creature was as inhumanly tall as he was beautiful. My first instinct was to be afraid. I tried to shrink away from the marble-white hand that reached out to take my arm in a gesture of reassurance, but no sooner did his rough, cool hand touch my skin did a feeling of peace spread through me like a warm balm. I stilled instantly beneath his firm, but soothing grip.

Assured that I was no longer afraid of him, he lifted his other hand and placed his open hand over the delicate silver-blue of his tunic, similar to the one the woman was wearing before. "_Cirdan_," he intoned carefully. I think he was telling me his name.

When he looked expectantly at me, I realized that he wanted mine and somehow managed to dislodge the words from my dry, cracked throat. "Emma," I told him.

I hadn't told anyone my name in so long I'd almost forgotten it myself. I was always _corpsman _or _corporal _or _medic_, sometimes _Hardy _if someone bothered to remember I was more than a number draped in weatherworn dungarees. But the last time anyone called me Emma was the day I left my mom, when she'd wrapped her arms around my shoulders and made me promise I'd come back to her.

It occurred to me that I'd never heard the name _Cirdan _before. And it seemed that he was experiencing the same line of thinking on his end – his high, pale brow deepened into a thoughtful furrow, pulling lines into his ageless face as it lowered and bunched at the bridge of his nose. Even those deep wrinkles did nothing to make him look older.

For a long time, he puzzled over my own name in silence, never looking away from my face. He raised one lithe hand to his chin, where it rested like a crown at the top of a full, yet tidy silver beard.

He seemed older and wiser than the one I'd met before. Though his eyes were bright and clear in their shallow blue, they ran much deeper and darker beneath the deceptive surface. I could see the age of the earth itself reflected there. The longer I looked, the longer the years became – thousands upon thousands of years, older than all the stars, planets, galaxies in the universe combined, and all of them colored with the rage and sorrow and decay of war. Sorrow seemed the most prominent, running like a spark of raw memory through the shadows of his heavy gaze. With every blink, they grew darker, their story unfolding - like fractures widening through thin fragile ice.

It was almost as though he _had _lived a thousand years.

I remembered my own desperate circumstances. As curious as I was about this strange, otherworldly man, the reality that I was stranded in this strange place came back to me and I was starting to feel dizzy again.

"Um." I cleared my throat, and I couldn't help but marvel at the high, graceful cheekbones that only seemed to grow sharper when he smiled at my attempt to speak. "Do _you_ speak English?"

Confusion ghosted across his face, but he regained his composure quickly and spoke in a voice softer than crushed velvet. "_It is not Westron__you speak, nor any form of Elvish that I can recall even from the ancient days of the Eldar...are you of Dunland, lady? Your tongue is rough like that of their kind."_

I blinked at him, my mouth going slack at its chapped hinges. The only words I caught in that sentence – _Westron_ and _Dunland _– I'd never even heard before, not in any language I recognized. Again, I asked him if he spoke English, enunciating each word as carefully as though I were teaching a toddler a new word. Still he looked at me as though he didn't understand.

He tried a new language, one that sounded as though it originated from somewhere in Eastern Europe, but I still couldn't find any trace of familiarity in the midst of the convoluted babble. I shook my head no when he at last looked to me for an answer. He held up one hand, excused himself from the room, and was gone for only a few minutes before he came back with what looked like a quill, a bottle full of ink, and a few pieces of odd looking paper. He set the bottle of ink on the edge of the end table at my bedside so I could reach and the brown-stained paper in my lap. When he had fitted the quill into my trembling fingers, he then tapped on the paper – he wanted me to draw to communicate.

I began to draw my story for him – my shift at the hospital, coming back to the tent, my run in with the man with the gun, waking up on the beach...I drew everything that I thought might give him an idea as to why I was here. When I had finished, I pushed the paper toward him, the quill still nestled between my index and middle fingers. He studied my drawings with some measure of concern and frustration, the smooth skin between his brows knitted tightly together in dark, aggravated lines.

Then, his expression changed. An idea seemed to come to him. He turned the withered old paper over and held out his hand to me, as if to ask for the quill. I gave it to him without question, watching with growing fascination as he dipped the quill into the ink once, twice, then began to drag its stained point across the page. The room was quiet except for the scratching of the quill and my own labored breath. He drew long, curved lines at first, then began to scribble characters in the empty spaces between, as if writing words. I couldn't tear my eyes away; at first I had no clear understanding of what he was doing or what he was trying to tell me, but slowly it began to dawn on me – he was drawing a map.

When he handed it to me, letting the clean quill fall into the folds of his glittering robes, I saw that it _was_ a map. But not of any place I had ever seen. The names which filled the empty spaces between mountain ranges, ink-blot forests, and little black rivers looked just as strange to me as the depictions themselves. I had never heard of this place before. Was he trying to tell me that this is where I was?

I looked up from the map, fixing my horrified stare back on him. "I'm..._here_?"

He dipped the quill once again and circled a small area close to a mountain range that seemed to be called Ered Luin – _Mithlond. _

Our eyes met, his own bright and gleaming with a growing hope that I was beginning to understand.

He pointed to the map, then to me, and said one word that seemed to fill the entire room.

"_Arda_."

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><p>thanks for reading! :)<p> 


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